Editor’s note: I’m using today’s Poems and Poetics to celebrate the publication of Michael Palmer’s new poetry collection, The Laugher of the Sphinx, just out from New Directions. A great & thoroughly distinctive poet in his own right, Palmer in these poems shows his affinity & regard for two of the great ones who came just before him, & in “Light Moves” especially, the work “pointedly echoes and evolves from Mac Low’s 22 Light Poems,” published several decades earlier. Along with this sense of contemporary & historical kinship, the lyric force of Palmer’s own later poetry is a turning that illuminates the power of the work (his & theirs) that came before and the work still to come. The presence here of the attendant linkages is surely one of his greatest resources: “that company I always hear as I work, and for whom I write, and to whom I write.” (J.R.)

Light through the Paper Houserippling across floors and walls,across the words of the walls,its paper tables, paper chairs,its corners,pale light by which it reads itself,fills and empties itself,and speaks.

Light Moves 4

Watcher on the cliff-headin afternoon light, aqueous light,watcher being watchedin the salt-silver lightamidst the darting of terns,beach swallows and gulls,between the snow of sandand the transit of clouds,keeper of thought or prisoner of thought,watcher being watched,snowman of sand,anonymous man.

Light Moves 5

Night-sun and day-suntwinned and intertwined,light by a bedside,cat’s eye by night,owl light and crystal light,endless motion of the light,the rise and the fall,the splintered flare,churning northern lights,phosphor, tip of iris,gunmetal moon’sfar, reflected light,oil sheenon pelican’s wing.

Light Moves 6

And yet what have we donewhere have we gonesometimes in light sometimes nottravelingwe say the great world the small worldthe fieldspatched with yellow the sudden crowsthe city’s streetsalone among othersthe billowing streetsbodies crowding pastoutlined by light.What have we doneamong the roads and fieldsin the theater’s shadows and the theater’s lightso bright you cannot seethose watching beyondin perfect rows in the dark.

ABOUT POEMS AND POETICS: In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

Technicians of the Sacred, August 2017Expanded Fiftieth Anniversary EditionUniversity of California Press

* The index below is organized chronoloigally, starting with a post from May 20, 2012, when Poems and Poetics first appeared in Jacket2. Earlier posts in the series, going back to 2008, may be found at Poems and Poetics.